Makes sense that leftists would be more likely to reject the platform that is centralizing power

It's not corporate based social with a mostly US based audience.

It was literally started because of political censorship of leftists on reddit.

I think its more anarchist which skews moderately left for obvious reasons.

Edit: No mods, no masters ;)

I think it's because it's still smaller than Reddit.

This is just my opinion, but since modern right wing is reactionary they (by definition) require people to react to and rally against. In turn they need people to react to them for validation. Just look at any of the many right wing social media clones, without a "leftist" audience to perform for they inevitably get bored and leave, causing the site to slowly wither and die.

All the right wingers went to Gab, Parler, Voat, Poal, Truth Social and other places.

The developers of Lemmy are the type who have jumped the shark when it comes to leftism.

https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#whats-going-on-with-the-uyghurs

I'm still new here and still trying to figure out what the community is like.

I consider myself left of center on most (but not all) topics. I have a deep hatred for the GOP and everything they stand for, but I also am willing to nitpick the endless things that the Democrats do wrong. Ultimately I consider myself a pragmatist - in other words, you will never get your left-of-center policies enacted if the country as a whole is still leaning to the far right. Try to shift the country to your side first and THEN go for more progressive stuff. It absolutely doesn't work any other way. Trying to push for change too fast and too much will only get you a ton of blowback which will ultimately hurt your cause.

So having very briefly explained my overall stance even I was surprised by some of the comments I've seen - like far left stuff. But it's weird here because there are just simply not that many people, so even one or two comments in a lightly trafficked thread might make you think a site is heavily biased one way or another.

Also, please note that we have already entered US campaign season. Like the FBI has been warning us for literally years now (but few take seriously), there are indeed "bad actors" out there on various social media platforms (Reddit was notorious for this) trying to sway the US election toward Trump. They will do and say anything for it to happen, and that has been proven time and again. Like they fooled some gay groups a few years back and convinced them that Trump would support them, or back on Reddit reading Bernie-focused subs trying to convince progressives that, once again, Trump was the candidate who Sanders would prefer to win. Wild, and crazy stuff, but all it takes is a few percentage of people to buy into this mess to swing an election. Lemmy is not immune to these propaganda campaigns either.

Since I didn’t subscribe to any communities that are clearly all about politics, I haven’t really noticed many political views in my feed. Just like with Reddit, I’m here mostly for the science and technology.

What if I told you reddits antiwork was basically a glimpse of everything we're seeing on far left Lemmy. Lemmy just doesn't have a honeymoon stage for it.

I'm not surprised that people who reject a platform with centralized authority for shifting to "deliver value to shareholders" mode would be more leftist.

Funny, just a few hours ago I was telling a friend that I noticed the opposite. This conversation started because while r/antiwork and r/work_reform had mostly incompatible ideologies, with antiwork being more radical, Lemmy suggested to me a community titled "Antiwork/Work reform" which is noticeably more status quo compacent. Additionally, the rate of posts going "capitalism isn't that bad, actually" and "fuck tankies" in my TL is higher than in Reddit.

I think this has to do with the amount of active users. If, say, 2% of active users are very vocal about abolishing wage slavery, if there are like 1000 users, that 2% is just 20 people, which wouldn't make a very active community, whereas if it's 100 000 users, then that makes 2000 people who can already make a sort of "echo chamber" where they can openly and actively discuss their ideas.

Also, not to forget that Reddit, like all mass social media, has algorithms meant to maximize your session lengths and that usually involves exposing you to more extremist ideas, both left and right.